Water

I call it my under-counter experience.

We completed a long-term project this week. I hooked up an under-counter cold water filter on our kitchen tap.

It counts as long-term because we have been putting it off for a few years. We filtered our drinking water until this last week. Although Los Angeles has some of the best quality drinking water, our city fathers could steal. See the movie China Town for a drama based on that story. Sometimes, when I could not wait for the Brita filter to finish dripping, I took my drinking water straight from the tap. But with my health and the age of our pipes, filtering seemed like a best practice. I have to drink four or five liters in the morning and about the same over the rest of the day to stay hydrated and beat being dizzy and run down. (Otherwise, I look robust and healthy.) Anyway, I have until now had two water filter pitchers on the counter and half a dozen water bottles in the fridge. The filtering industry looked a lot like a home brewery gone wrong. The congestion on the kitchen counter was killing our clean surface vibe. Clean Surfaces is a popular look among the children of hoarding parents who grew up in the Depression Era and never threw anything away. I once looked at a Home Depot kit and told my husband we could install that ourselves. He remembered and called me out on it. Good on him because my X-Man power is to put things off forever.

I picked out a kit, and I installed it last month. Now, all our cold water comes filtered out of the kitchen tap.

I will say the installation looked super easy. The hoses were marked in and out. I had all the tools needed. However, it nearly broke me to screw this all together. I am not a small creature; I have been cut in half once too often to nimbly plop myself down on the kitchen floor and mess with plumbing. While I was lying there in my failure, it did occur to me that in the future, I should only be spread out on the floor like this in expectation of the near-term arrival of paramedics.

There is a skill set to working in tight spaces with wrenches on your back that plumbers are well paid for, with good reason. I hooked it all up, turned on the water, and screamed, "What was I thinking?" as a puddle of cold, clear water formed around my limp body like the chalk outline of a murder crime scene.

Now, I am sitting up and drinking more fluids because I fell behind my quota and am cramping up. I say, "Maybe I need to reconfigure the bolts and rubber washers?" I also take stock of my self-awareness. I was way too cocky when I started. In fairness, I am the last person to be confident with plumbing tasks. After all, my plumbing is held together with silicon and staples and glued to a bag that could pop any second.

What am I reading this week?

Death's End | Cixin Liu

Death's End: A farm at the end of time. In the first book of this series, there is an ant hill. A single ant watches a character visit a grave. In the story, we meet our near-space neighbors who think we are bugs. Finally, in this book, Death's End, we embrace our role as the bugs of the universe and scramble to hide from a death sentence from the stars. Book two, The Dark Forest, is the realization that the search for ET should be the hiding from ET. Every alien is out to find and snuff us out like an ant underfoot.

To maintain coherence in the series, the main characters travel from one age to another in hibernation. One character has the thankless task of coming out of sleep just long enough to ruin everyone's future, one wrong choice after another.